Chamber and committees

Local authorities must determine for themselves how best to incorporate the biodiversity duty in their programmes and actions. There are no formal centralised monitoring arrangements. Although there is no specific obligation for local authorities to include measures relating to the biodiversity duty within their single outcome agreements, some agreements do include reference to relevant actions and targets and I have recently written to all local authorities to encourage them to consider whether this would provide a helpful way of setting out their plans for biodiversity delivery going forward. Local authority single outcome agreements for 2009 are published and available on the Improvement Service website www.improvementservice.org.uk.

The appointment of Mr David Garbutt as Chair of the Scottish Ambulance Service was announced on Tuesday 9 June 2009. The associated news release can be found at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/News/Releases/2009/06/08170034.

The Affordable Housing Investment Programme in 2008-09 delivered 6,506 new and improved home approvals and 6,260 new and improved home completions. Of the approvals 23% were for low-cost home ownership and of the completions 24% were for low-cost home ownership.

The approvals and completions exclude projects covered by the four-year Devanha programme in Grampian and other minor anomalies. These approvals figures differ to the published statistics for this reason http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Housing-Regeneration/HSfS.

 

The new council housing completions in 2007-08 were funded from local authorities'' own resources. Councils who have recently built new housing such as Midlothian Council, West Lothian Council, Aberdeen City Council, East Lothian Council and Orkney Islands Council are all to be very much commended for being at the vanguard of this much needed new development in housing. The additional funding for local authorities that this Government has announced will allow these and other local authorities to build on these efforts and further boost construction in subsequent years.

The Scottish Government has signalled its intention to approve grants for a record breaking 8,100 affordable homes, backed by £644 million from the Scottish Government''s Affordable Housing Investment Programme for this financial year (2009-10).

The first line of this news release clarifies that the number of completions supported by our Affordable Housing Investment Programme in 2008-09 was the highest since 2000-01.

In addition, the new figures released showed that the number of social houses completed in 2008-09 was the highest number since devolution at 4,913.

Housing statistics are only collected on a quarterly basis and it is therefore not possible to produce figures for individual months. Accordingly, the period of the previous administration is defined as running from April 2003 to the end of March 2007, equating to the financial years 2003-04 to 2006-07.

Information regarding local authority completions is only available on a quarterly basis. The following table shows the breakdown of house building completions by local authority area since April 2007. The political leadership of each authority can be found on COSLA''s website.

Local authority and housing association new build figures are published quarterly at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Housing-Regeneration/HSfS/NewBuild.

Local Authority New Build Completions Since April 2007

Local Authority	Local Authority Completions
Scotland	364
Aberdeen City	0
Aberdeenshire	0
Angus	0
Argyll and Bute	0
Clackmannanshire	0
Dumfries and Galloway	0
Dundee City	0
East Ayrshire	0
East Dunbartonshire	0
East Lothian	74
East Renfrewshire	0
Edinburgh, City of	0
Eilean Siar	0
Falkirk	0
Fife	0
Glasgow City	0
Highland	0
Inverclyde	0
Midlothian	289
Moray	0
North Ayrshire	0
North Lanarkshire	0
Orkney	1
Perth and Kinross	0
Renfrewshire	0
Scottish Borders, The	0
Shetland	0
South Ayrshire	0
South Lanarkshire	0
Stirling	0
West Dunbartonshire	0
West Lothian	0

 

While the number of houses started in the final two quarters of 2008 was 466 fewer than the same period in 2007, the number of social houses started in 2008-09 as a whole was the second highest since 1994-95 despite the challenging economic background. The highest number of starts occurred in 2007-08, during this Government''s term of office.

In addition, the number of social houses completed in 2008-09 was the highest since 1995-96.

Information regarding local authority completions is only available on a quarterly basis. From 1 April 1999 to 31 March 2007, 346 council houses and 31,001 housing association houses were completed.

Local authority and housing association new build figures are published quarterly at:

http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Statistics/Browse/Housing-Regeneration/HSfS/NewBuild.

As stated in the answer to the question S3W-24500 on 9 June 2009, the period of the previous administration was defined as spanning financial years 2003-04 to 2006-07. According to official statistics the number of local authority houses completed during this period was six.

Looking at starts, the official figures show that only 34 local authority houses were started in the period of the previous administration compared to 682 in the first two years of the current administration.

All answers to written parliamentary questions are available on the Parliament''s website, the search facility for which can be found at: http://www.scottish.parliament.uk/Apps2/Business/PQA/Default.aspx.